Anne Hathaway once got a lot of laughs out of her disastrous love life. One boyfriend of four years, Italian Raffaello Follieri, was exposed as a fraudster and was jailed for four years in 2008.

But the chat-show quips are history after the 31-year-old star wed actor and jewellery designer Adam Shulman, last September.

“I got through my pain the way I always deal with unpleasant things and that’s to make a joke of it,” she says.

“When we got married I thought it was a great party, but I honestly thought we were doing it more for tradition and I wasn’t prepared for the radical shift that my heart was going to have.

"Marriage isn’t for everyone but for me it has been the greatest spiritual journey I’ve been on.

“No matter what your dreams are, you’re always surprised by whatever life hands you. There’s a great quote that I love which says ‘Regardless of desire, life hands you who you are.’ I wish I knew who said that. It was a really cool person.”

Anne is equal parts Hollywood glamour and New York cool, having been born and brought up in Brooklyn, where she and Shulman, who got together in 2009, now live most of the time.

And they make sure they aren’t parted for long. She says: “I’m fortunate my husband has a job that allows him to travel, so he comes with me whenever possible.

“Sometimes that’s not possible and whenever that happens, we have a rule that we aren’t apart for more than two weeks at a time.”

She sips water as she settles into a chair in a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills and talks about her role of a scientist-astronaut named Brand in new hit movie Interstellar released in the UK on Friday.

Video Loading

Video Unavailable

Click to playTap to play

The video will start in 8Cancel

Play now

“When I read the script and saw I had most of the scientific dialogue, I thought: ‘Oh dear, oh no’,” Anne says with a laugh. “How am I going to learn that?

“And also, more importantly, how are we going to make this entertaining for the audience?

“Because if you tell people the biggest thrill ride of the year is going to be centred around astrophysics, I don’t think that anybody is going to believe you for a second.

“So I knew that part of my job would be to find a way to get all the science out there in a way that people can understand it, and in a way that was enjoyable and entertaining and thrilling; and for me, that’s always emotion.”

She plays one of four astronauts on a mission to find a habitable planet in another galaxy.

For most of filming she spent much of the time suspended on harnesses, floating in mid-air, suffering motion sickness and, in what could have been a life-threatening situation, immersed in frigid water with a serious risk of hypothermia.

But Anne, despite her slender frame and fragile appearance, is a robust trouper who came through the four-month shoot smiling.

It took her and the rest of the cast, which includes Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain and Michael Caine, from cornfields in Calgary, Alberta, to a glacier strafed by a volcano in Iceland.

(Image: FilmMagic)

It was there, while filming in the freezing waters, that her space suit started leaking. “It was a scene where my character becomes submerged in water and trapped, so I go down in the water expecting it’s probably not going to be warm but I will at least be dry,” she recalls.

“But after about ten seconds the suit is totally full of water. I don’t know what’s happening or why, but everybody is hurting and cold so I don’t say anything about it and wonder, ‘How long can this last?’ Well, it did last and I became tingly and couldn’t feel anything and things were starting to get a bit hazy.

“I thought Chris is going to be way more annoyed if I die of hypothermia than he is if I speak up about it and maybe delay filming for five minutes.

“So I threw caution to the wind and told him what was going on and he said, ‘OK, let’s roll right now.’

“And we were done. I was just really, really, really cold and it’s not that Chris sent me off to get warmed up. Wimps don’t last long on his set.

“When I took the suit off we realised a zip at the back was open just a tiny bit but I got a good story out of it because everybody wants to talk about it.”

Interstellar is nearly three hours long and has astrophysicist Kip Thorne as an executive producer. It explores black holes, wormholes, quantum physics, relativity and extra-dimensional space.

Even now, Anne confesses she still does not totally understand its full meaning: “I had a sort of working knowledge of the concept of the film and I can’t say that I understood everything, but it all made sense to me logically and I felt very comfortable with the ideas in the film.”

Since working on it, she has given thought to what lies ahead for humankind.

“I do see a lot of people living their lives with a greater sense of awareness and a greater sense of urgency,” she says, sombre for once. “I hope things don’t get to the 11th hour before a large number of people take it seriously.”

But Anne thinks that deep down, we all want to live good lives and that everybody would like to live on a healthy planet.

“Does that mean we should build rocket ships to shoot us into outer space?” she asks. “If we can, I think we should.”

The daughter of a lawyer father and actress mother, Anne started her showbiz career singing at New York’s Carnegie Hall at 14.

Three days later she was offered a role in the short-lived television drama Get Real. She became an overnight sensation in 2001’s The Princess Diaries but found herself a reluctant role model to teenage girls.

It was an image she got away from by taking daring roles, including going topless in Havoc and Brokeback Mountain.

There was an Oscar-nominated performance as the girl with the boss from hell in The Devil Wears Prada and she was a sultry Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises.

Video Loading

Video Unavailable

Click to playTap to play

The video will start in 8Cancel

Play now

She won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2012 for Fantine in Les Miserables.

Despite her stardom, she has never “gone Hollywood”. “I just went to my ten-year college reunion, and it was awesome,” she says.

“I stayed really close with my tight group of friends from college and I still see most of them every day. I’m going to see a bunch tonight actually.

“Going back it was nice to see people I had lost touch with as well but after a certain part of the evening,” she laughed, “I don’t really remember much.”